A partial meltdown of fuel in the No. 1 reactor building may be causing isolated reactions, Denis Flory, nuclear safety director for the IAEA, said at a press conference in Vienna. …

Nuclear experts call such reactions “localized criticality.” They consist of a burst of heat, radiation and sometimes an “ethereal blue flash,” according to the U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory website. …

These days, with the invention of caller ID and text messaging, it seems that prank calls have more or less fallen by the wayside. But I’m not ready to surrender this classic joke just yet; too many hours in my life have been spent trying to decide who to call and which prank to pull. So for all you wide-eyed, greenhorn, wannabe pranksters out there, here are a few tips on how to transform yourself from a refrigerator runner to a master.

As April Fools jokers hatch their plans, what’s the secret to a perfect prank, asks broadcaster Toby Amies. And how far do the very best tricksters go in preparing their practical jokes?

What better game than Monopoly to teach the young uns about the wonderful world of capitalism? Well, you’d be surprised to learn that the board game was actually created to teach people the evils of capitalism!

“With the help of a friend, but with no assistance from the museum, Harvey Stromberg put on his exhibition himself. A New York artist, he describes his work as “photo-sculpture.” To prepare the exhibition, he spent some weeks in the museum, disguised as a student with a notebook under his arm, peering nearsightedly at pictures while at the same time measuring and photographing museum equipment: light switches, locks, air vents, buzzers, segments of the floor and bricks in the garden wall. These photographs he printed actual size, covered the backs with adhesive, and one day he sauntered through the museum adding 300 trompe l’oell photographs (“photosculpture”) of museum equipment to its walls and floors. (The floor pieces were a mistake: “I didn’t realize that when they buffed the floors they would buff them right off.” says Stromberg.)”

Letterbombing is a subversive way to deliver a message anywhere on Facebook.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) has fined Hustler Video $14,175 for failing to use condoms in its productions.

According to the citation issued to Hustler Video and obtained by AVN, Cal-OSHA cites three violations, in which the video production company “failed to provide condoms or other protective equipment” for performers. Additionally the company was cited for failure to provide an injury and illness prevention program, and for failing to provide protection against “other potentially infectious materials.” Hustler was fined $4,725 for each violation.

“They ask you concerning (intercourse during) menses. Say, “It is hurtful.” So keep away from wives during the menses, and do not approach them till they are clean.”

If a person who is engaged in sexual intercourse with his wife discovers that her period has begun, then he should immediately withdraw from her.

“The first surprise was to see that despite being 200 times smaller, the ants are able to hold their own by rushing at the wasps, spraying them with acid and biting them,” Grangier said. “But the most amazing was to observe that wasps, apparently frustrated by having to compete with ants, will pick them up in their mandibles, fly off and drop them away from the food.”

What IS pegging?

As it is generally understood, pegging is defined as a woman using a strap-on on her male partner for anal play. The name (and this touches on your followup) came from a poll conducted by Dan Savage a few years ago—a reader wrote in asking for a word to describe this then unnamed sexual practice, and pegging was the winning selection. (There were two other choices, but the only one I remember was bobbing.)

Some 155 Marines from the service’s Chemical Biological Incident Response Force are scheduled to leave the U.S. Thursday and arrive in Japan Friday, a U.S. defense official said.

Some scholars say early versions of the Bible featured Asherah, a powerful fertility goddess who may have been God’s wife.

Research by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, unearthed clues to her identity, but good luck finding mention of her in the Bible. If Stavrakopoulou is right, heavy-handed male editors of the text all but removed her from the sacred book.

• Cooking temperatures: “I like a low heat around 250 degree for a long slow cook. I start the out with the meat being tied to the grill alive and kicking. After the meat pass I remover her from the heat and gut her, and then back to the grill for several more hours after about a 10 to 12 hour cook the meat just fall off the bone. I shred the meat and mix it with BBQ and red pepper flakes very tasty.”

• Celebrities: “[Miley Cyrus] needs to be hung upside down from a meathook, have her throat slit, and be sliced into chunks of meat. It’s not like she has a remarkable music career or anything.”

Social networking website MySpace lost over ten million users between January and February 2011, according to comScore. In February 2011, the Internet website had less than 63 million users, down from a previous total of approximately 73 million. In the same month, 2.3 million individuals were on the site in the United Kingdom.

Brazilian scientists have developed a way of using fibers from bananas, pineapples and other plants to create plastic that is stronger and lighter than the petroleum-based stuff. So-called nanocellulose fibers rival Kevlar in strength but are renewable, and the researchers believe they could be widely used within a couple of years.

“The properties of these plastics are incredible,” Alcides Leão, a researcher at Sao Paulo State University, said in a statement. “They are light, but very strong — 30 percent lighter and three to four times stronger.”

As an expected increase in the cost of raw materials looms for late summer, consumers are beginning to encounter shrinking food packages.

With unemployment still high, companies in recent months have tried to camouflage price increases by selling their products in tiny and tinier packages. So far, the changes are most visible at the grocery store, where shoppers are paying the same amount, but getting less.

According to a Starlogger description, StarLogger records every keystroke made on your computer on every window, even on password protected boxes.

This key logger is completely undetectable and starts up whenever your computer starts up. See everything being typed: emails, messages, documents, web pages, usernames, passwords, and more. StarLogger can email its results at specified intervals to any email address undetected so you don’t even have to be at the computer your[sic] are monitoring to get the information. The screen capture images can also be attached automatically to the emails as well as automatically deleted.

While this morning’s orbital image of Mercury is historic, these two images are the ones that have truly left me in complete awe today. Even more so than the most accurate, highest resolution view of Earth to date.

But unlike Blue Marble, these images are not by NASA. In fact, they look a lot different from NASA’s Earth imagery. Much better and crispier, some may say. But are they really better? Are they more accurate? NASA has explained to us why they look so different compared to their own.

✧ Facebook drops uprising page after Israel protest

A Facebook page calling on Palestinians to take up arms against Israel has been removed from the social-networking site after a high-profile Israeli appeal.

✧ Group warns EPA ready to increase radioactive release guidelines

The radiation guides called Protective Action Guides or PAGs are protocols for responding to radiological events ranging from nuclear power-plant accidents to dirty bombs.

Drinking water, for example, would have a huge increase in allowable public exposure to radioactivity, the group says, that would include:

A nearly 1000-fold increase in strontium-90

A 3000 to 100,000-fold hike for iodine-131

An almost 25,000 rise for nickel-63

The new radiation guidance would also allow long-term cleanup standards thousands of times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted, permitting doses to the public that EPA itself estimates would cause a cancer in as much as every fourth person exposed, the group says.

That’s right, conspiracies around musicians’ deaths.

Just about everyone I know loves music, and there is no question that music is an incredible social, political and cultural force to be reckoned with. A popular musician or songwriter with a power political message can lead to disaster for oppressive governments!

Of course I don’t have any proof that these were conspiracies, only my suspicions.

One recognizes a man by the size of his gun.

Start preparing for the third meltdown of the 21st Century, and depression

Denial and lies. Remember, 93% of what you hear about markets, finance and the economy are guesses, wishful thinking and lies intended to manipulate you into making decisions that suck money from your pockets into Wall Street. They get rich telling lies about securities. They hate any SEC fiduciary rules forcing them to tell the truth.

But the fact is, on an inflation-adjusted basis, Wall Street lost 20% of your retirement money in the decade from 2000 to 2010, over $10 trillion. And “Irrational Exuberance’s” Robert Shiller warns of a third meltdown coming. You better start preparing now.

Before you start betting any more at Wall Street’s rigged casinos, think long and hard about these six megatoxins lurking in America’s Super-Rich Delusion, a mind-altering pandemic infecting our nation’s leadership in Washington, Corporate America and Wall Street … but also “trickling down,” infecting many Americans.

Collagen Westwood, 21, from north London said she is thrilled if she is mistaken for a man dressing as a woman on a night out.

It’s been a bad week for disco—first the death of Loleatta Holloway, and now comes the news that Kurt Hauenstein of the German band Supermax has passed on. Supermax were one of the most popular disco bands of their era on continental Europe, managing to seamlessly blend funk, prog rock, sci-fi and sleaze. They had also won over a lot of new fans in the last few years, when the growing interest in revisiting Cosmic and European disco shone the spotlight back in their corner. Their biggest hit was “Love Machine,” which by anyone’s standards is a bone fide classic.

Police said the man’s skin had become attached to the fabric of the chair after he sat in it for two years

Authorities said he was sitting in his own feces and urine and maggots were visible.

The Vatican’s chief exorcist claimed last year that the Devil lurked in the Vatican, the very heart of the Catholic Church.

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron, scream, dribble and slobber, utter blasphemies and have to be physically restrained.

He claimed that the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See. He said Pope Benedict XVI believed “wholeheartedly” in the practice of exorcism.

A pregnant woman in Staten Island had an undeniably “crappy” Wednesday morning, according to local police. Around 5:30 a.m., 24-year-old Rasheed (Illuminati) Harrison, her ex-boyfriend, showed up outside her apartment door, stripped naked, and defecated, SI Live reports. Harrison then smeared the excrement on the apartment door and set it — and his clothes — on fire.

Court papers show that when he lit the fire, he cursed profusely, and said, “I’m going to set your house on fire and this whole building down with you in it.”

Neighbors heard him yelling, “I’m the devil!” in the process of spreading his excrement on the door.

In a speech last week, the leader of the New Black Panther Party, Malik Zulu Shabazz, lashed out at President Obama. Calling him an “Uncle Tom,” Shabazz said Obama “represents the white man.” Shabazz is a controversial figure — his calls for equal rights for blacks are often mixed with anti-Semitic rhetoric. In fact, the Anti-Defamation League calls the New Black Panther Party “the largest organized anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in America.” Shabazz took over as National Chairman after the equally controversial Khalid Abdul Muhammad died in 2001. Thanks Aron

An anti-abortion billboard campaign using a likeness of President Barack Obama to target African-American women has angered women’s groups in Chicago.

They are being displayed for free after the group’s controversial billboards declaring “the most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb” were taken down following protests in

✧ New footage of Ian Tomlinson death

Dramatic new footage has been released yesterday of an English newspaper vendor who collapsed and died in the City of London on his way home from work during the 2009 G-20 summit protests. Police radio recording also included in this video. Thanks johntyuiyo

Radiation found in US milk

Very low levels of radiation turned up in a sample of milk from Washington state, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday, but federal officials assured consumers not to worry.

A week ago I traveled down to Compton, Calif. to report on a community fight there over the future of a public school. (Stay tuned for more on that front.) As I waited to meet with parents in McKinley Elementary’s PTA room, Compton School Police Officer Lorenzo Gray came in and pulled out a thick, black binder filled with pictures of colorful guns—pink guns, yellow guns, guns with American flags, guns with white bunnies on them.

“Is this gun real or fake?” he asked six Latina mothers at the PTA room. “Fake,” the six mothers responded after they consulted with each other.

After school special drama about the dangers of drugs and drinking. Featuring Judd Nelson and Burt Reynolds, who must have been caught doin’ something naughty ‘n had to do this as a community service. Also starring a young and impressionable Dermot Mulroney.

1917 J. A. F. Fisher Let. 9 Sept. in Memories (1919) v. 78, I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!

On February 5th, 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations, to make the case for war in Iraq. A central plank of his presentation: the anthrax attacks that killed five people and helped send the country into a panic in the days after 9/11.

“Less than a teaspoon-full of dry anthrax in an envelope shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001. This forced several hundred people to undergo emergency medical treatment and killed two postal workers just from an amount just about this quantity that was inside of an envelope,” Powell said. “Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters. If concentrated into this dry form, this amount would be enough to fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons..”

By the end of the following month, the invasion of Iraq was underway.

✰ Manslaughter charge explored in BP spill

Manslaughter and perjury are among possible charges that Justice Department investigators are exploring in the early stages of their probe into the Gulf oil spill, people familiar with the inquiry said Tuesday.

And operation of the war craft, guzzling ever-expensive fuel to maintain their positions off the Libyan coast and in the skies above, could reach millions of dollars a week, experts say.

Our Milky Way galaxy may be home to at least two billion Earthlike planets, a new study says.

But don’t start making colonization plans just yet: The number is actually far lower than many scientists were expecting, which could make it hard to find other “Earths” in our galaxy, the study authors say.

✰ The Drones Are Malfunctioning…And Another One, This Makes Three

Reptiles speakin’ in tongues…

Subcontractors to several companies connected to the plant have reportedly been offered 80,000 to 100,000 yen a day (£608 to £760) to join the operation, according to one former plant worker. The team of men inside the complex have been dubbed “samurai” and “suicide squads” in the popular press.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the agency, played down the potential effects of the radioactive seawater as residents in the area had been evacuated and there was no fishing activity in the region.

“Iodine 131 has a half-life of eight days, and even considering its concentration in marine life, it will have deteriorated considerably by the time it reaches people,” Nishiyama told a news conference.

The reason radioactivity can be measured is that radioactive material is escaping. What is dangerous is when that material enters your body and irradiates it from inside. These industry-mouthpiece scholars come on TV and what to they say? They say as you move away the radiation is reduced in inverse ratio to the square of the distance. I want to say the reverse. Internal irradiation happens when radioactive material is ingested into the body. What happens? Say there is a nuclear particle one meter away from you. You breathe it in, it sticks inside your body; the distance between you and it is now at the micron level. One meter is 1000 millimeters, one micron is one thousandth of a millimeter. That’s a thousand times a thousand: a thousand squared. That’s the real meaning of “inverse ratio of the square of the distance.” Radiation exposure is increased by a factor of a trillion. Inhaling even the tiniest particle, that’s the danger.

In normal times, Masataka Shimizu lives in The Tower, a luxury high-rise in the same upscale Tokyo district as the U.S. Embassy. But he hasn’t been there for more than two weeks, according to a doorman. The Japanese public hasn’t seen much of him recently either. Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, the company that owns a haywire nuclear power plant 150 miles from the capital, is the most invisible — and most reviled — chief executive in Japan. Amid rumors that Shimizu had fled the country, checked into a hospital or committed suicide, company officials said Monday that their boss had suffered an unspecified “small illness” because of overwork after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake sent a tsunami crashing onto his company’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

I’ve been eating two family-size bags a day for two years, and little else for the past decade. My shopping trolley looks as if I’m having a children’s party. The idea of eating anything else is repellent; I don’t like being full and bloated, which is how “proper food” makes me feel. I have a tea for breakfast, skip lunch and then I’m ready for my first large bag of crisps at around 4pm and my second bag at 8pm. During the day I’ll have a few cups of tea and sometimes a cola. I don’t get ravenous because my body is used to it after all these years.

While testing out the paywall Monday afternoon, Mashable readers Dmitry Beniaminov and Yuri Victor pointed out that it’s breathtakingly easy to subvert the paywall. Readers need only remove “?gwh=numbers” from the URL. They can also clear their browser caches, or switch browsers as soon as they see the subscription prompt. All three of these simple fixes will let them continue reading.

Here’s what the Times Square station looked like 25 years ago. The footage was shot with a 16mm film camera in June of ’86, about three years before the MTA officially implemented its “clean train” policy and took subway cars festooned with graffiti out of service. Also of interest, signs for the “K” and “CC” trains.

“Stoned” is a classic made-for-TV movie shown on ABC as an Afterschool Special back in 1980, then on HBO in the late 80’s. Starring Scott Baio who was on Charles In Charge, Zapped, Chachi on Happy Days, all that good shit.

Teddy: [both are stoned after smoking a bong at Teddy’s home] Are you high?
Jack Melon: Am I who?
[both laugh]
Jack Melon: Hey man, look at that tree, all bent and twisted. It looks like Old Man Eber.
Teddy: Old man who?
Jack Melon: Old Man Eber. I walked past that tree hundreds of times and never saw him. How come I never noticed?
Teddy: ‘Cause grass helps you see things clearer.
Jack Melon: I thought it was supposed to cloud things up.
Teddy: Just the opposite. You see things for less of what you want them to be and more for what they really are.

Further proof that the recording industry’s oft-repeated claims of the downfall of the entire music industry hold no water: a new report finding that filesharing has led directly to “reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of independent labels.” In other words, in the past decade, we have seen more music from independent outlets and at lower prices – something that consumers and music fans should all be happy about.

◆ Florida pill mills: Different drugs, same faces

Ex-cons like Vinny Colangelo are barred from certain business pursuits.

Felons can’t get a license in Florida as a pest-control operator. Colangelo can’t be a private detective or paramedic or title insurance agent or bail bondsman or labor union business agent. He can forget about employment with the Florida Lottery. Or qualifying as a notary.

Yet according to the DEA, Vincent Colangelo, who couldn’t kill bugs, serve cocktails or tail a cheating husband, could operate seven pain clinics and a pharmacy in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. His pill mills peddled more than 660,000 doses of oxycodone in just two years. The feds calculated Vinny’s proceeds at $22,392,391.

People in Seattle who would never touch heroin are trying fentanyl. What they don’t know is that it’s basically the same thing, only stronger.

The long-term use of ketamine does not only affect users’ minds. Studies show it destroys their bladders too.

These images present an excellent invitation to understanding the size and scope of one section of the opium industry in India. I found these pictures in the 29 July 1882 issue of the Scientific American, which in turn had reproduced them from the Bengal Commissioner Lt. Col. Walter S. Sherwill, who published them as color lithographs in 1850 and which (again) found their way into print in The Truth about Opium Smoking by Benjamin Broomhill1(1882). They are iconic images of a devastating trade and were frequently reproduced over many decades–mostly not for the “devastating” part of what I just wrote, but more for the industrial/business appreciation end, as was the case with this article in SciAmerican. The British interest in the trade stretched back two cneturies earlier, and of course the use of opium bends far back into Neolithic times.

In the summer of 1951 New York City was a marijuana jungle. From underpasses in the Bronx to empty lots on Avenue X, the razor-toothed fronds of 10 foot tall Cannabis sativa plants could be seen all around the city happily waving in the wind like any other innocuous and legal weed. But for all their persistence in invading the city’s forgotten horticultural corners, these plants were likely waving farewell: New York was no friend to pot.

This post will describe how to construct a pair of goggles which can be used to induce geometric visual hallucinations (1 2 3) via strobe light patterns. This tutorial should be accessible to anyone familiar with Arduino hacking, and I do not go into details of the electronics design. The effects are quite remarkable. These goggles can be constructed for 25 to 50 dollars, depending on how good you are at scavenging parts. I believe this design to be superior to some similar designs seen on the internet, and very much cheaper than this commercial equivalent ($649).

The deputy D.A. who prosecuted Paris Hilton and Bruno Mars scored coke 3 to 4 times a week in the crack den of Las Vegas … this according to the police report obtained by TMZ, and we’ve learned he’s been locked out of his office and is about to get fired.

While the U.S. State Department spends millions of dollars helping people in the Middle East circumvent Web censorship, a handful of California companies are providing autocratic Middle East regimes with the technology to censor the Web, reports The Wall Street Journal. The global Web-security market is a hot industry (valued at $1.8 billion in 2010) and U.S. companies are competing abroad to deliver web-blocking technologies to, in some cases, stridently repressive regimes. Here’s a look at what U.S. companies are up to in the region

Circa 1979. Remember, in Colombia they call it “bah-say”. Here we say, “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.”

The TargetMap website has released a penis average length world map, using colors to indicate the lengths of the men in the 115 countries of the world. Amongst them, Africa and Central and Southern America’s “performance” were the best. The average length in Congo was 17.93 centimeters, making it the world champion, while all Asian countries were all less than 11 centimeters, with South Korea in last place at 9.66 centimeters

As it is understood, this map was created by netizens, with sources indicated with some of the data. Amongst the 115 countries shown on the map, the top three countries are Congo, Ecuador, and Ghana; while the length of Asian males on average are shorter than other countries, with Hong Kong placing 105th at 11.19 centimeters, Japan and mainland China at 10.78 centimeters occupying 110th place in hot pursuit.

A mere 20,000 Twitter users steal almost half of the spotlight on Twitter, which now ropes in a billion tweets every week.

That means only 0.05% of the social network’s user base attracts attention, according to a new Yahoo Research study titled, “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter.”

Of the 260 million tweets with URLs that the study’s authors analyzed, nearly 50% of the tweets consumed were created by what they called “elite” users who fall into four categories: media, celebrities, organizations and bloggers. “Ordinary” users encompass everyone else.

As a child in Uganda, John Bosco remembers hearing an old wives’ tale that if a man fell asleep in the sun and it crossed over him, he would wake up as a woman. “I used to try that as a kid,” says John now, some 30 years later. He sits at a table in a busy cafe across the road from the railway station in Southampton, his fingers playing with the handle of a glass of hot chocolate. “I’d spend all day lying under the sun. From childhood, I wanted to be a girl. I wanted dolls. At school, I played netball. I wanted to dress up like a girl … I rubbed herbs into my chest that were meant to make your breasts grow. I tried everything but it didn’t work.”

At a halal KFC in Sydney, Australia. A customer orders bacon and a muslim employee loses control.

The clip presented here is excerpted from ‘Motorcycle Kill,’ a video collected and shared by members of the “kill team” of U.S. soldiers who murdered civilians in Afghanistan and mutilated the corpses. The jumpy, 30-minute video – shot by soldiers believed to be with another battalion in the 5th Stryker Brigade – shows American troops gunning down two Afghans on a motorcycle who may have been armed. Even if the killings were part of a legitimate combat engagement, however, it is a clear violation of Army standards to share such footage. The video was taken on patrol with a helmet-mounted camera; at one point, the soldier shooting the images can be heard boasting, “I got it all on camera.”

Life can be lonely on the high seas and one pirate has decided enough is enough, it’s about time he got himself a wife.

But the Somali pirate chief has taken a fancy to his 13-year-old Danish hostage – and he is so besotted with her he’s willing to let the rest of her family go free, and even forget the $5million dollar ransom his pirate colleagues demanded.

It was the biggest manhunt in FBI history. So it’s not surprising that investigators took all kinds of extraordinary measures to try to figure out who mailed the anthrax-filled letters that killed five people, scared the country half to death, and have jumped back into public consciousness, thanks to a series of independent reviews over the last six weeks.

But even by the outsized standards of this anthrax case, one step stood out: an attempt to, in effect, reverse-engineer the mailings that carried the killer spores, based on microscopic differences between the blue eagles imprinted on the envelopes.

New evidence has emerged that the Iranian government sees the current unrest in the Middle East as a signal that the Mahdi–or Islamic messiah–is about to appear.

CBN News has obtained a never-before-seen video produced by the Iranian regime that says all the signs are moving into place — and that Iran will soon help usher in the end times.

While the revolutionary movements gripping the Middle East have created uncertainty throughout the region, the video shows that the Iranian regime believes the chaos is divine proof that their ultimate victory is at hand.

Just found this movie that I had only seen wild pictures of in my search for punksploitation classics. Pretty fuckin’ awesome! The leader of the gang ‘Tarzan’ rocks a fully studded face mask ‘n leads a motley crew of motorcycle ridin’ 30-something Mexicans with eye makeup, mustaches, ‘n multicolored poodle mohawks, sportin’ names like ‘Pirate’ & ‘Caligula’. They ride around robbin’ ‘n pillagin’ to afford the pot ‘n snow that fuels their all-night desert orgies of fightin’ ‘n fuckin’. All this and a hard drivin’ theme song by Three Souls In My Mind. What’s not to like?!